From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [103]
So the three of them get together, find an Uncle Sam hotel and go into business. The friend with the connection doesn’t pan out; he can’t raise the bread. The account executive who’s got some kind of promise that he can have an account when he opens suddenly finds that he doesn’t have any business. The man who tells you he’s going to give you business doesn’t give it to you and all of a sudden you can’t get him on the phone.
It was very tough for us in the beginning. There were the four founding partners: Ron, myself, Frank Seibke, an art director, and Ned Tolmach, a copywriter, all of us from Bates. And two girls – Barbara Kalish and a kid named Sandy Levy. We were at 635 Madison Avenue then and we had too much space. Just the six of us rattling around in these big offices. We were sitting around making presentations, hoping against hope that the guys would invite us to see them at their offices instead of ours. We got a little business but after three months we were in deep trouble. It was December and one day Ned and Frank came in and said they were leaving. It was just too tough. That day, the day they left, was very bad. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon and we figured we had $11,000 left in the bank after three months. There was furniture and rent, salaries for us and nothing but money going out. The lawyer got $5,000 for setting us up and the accountant took a fee too. You’re talking about $2,000 going out every week with nothing coming in and we were sitting there and we realized that we had less than $11,000 left. We figured that if we quit paying ourselves and stretched it as far and as wide as we could, we might be able to last until March. Here we were on December 8th, I think it was, and it dawned on me that it was like the worst day of all time.
We had a lot of guys saying to us, ‘Well, you know, we were considering you but now that Frank and Ned have left, well …’ We had this date staring at us, March 1, the doors close and the sheriff comes in and takes the furniture out. We would have continued to try, but can you imagine trying to pitch an account without having an office – without having at least a girl answering the phone? If Sandy was out sick and Barbara was out doing something, a potential client would call Jerry Della Femina & Partners and get a guy answering. It was so frustrating because you know that all you need is time and you realize by the end of February you’re out of business.
Then I remembered something. One of my heroes, really, is Mike Todd. The great Mike Todd story is that once he had a show running at the Winter Garden in 1944 and it was about to close. It was some wartime thing with Gypsy Rose Lee in it and it was in terrible shape. Todd didn’t have any money and he didn’t know what to do. He needed at least six months to get his money back and he can’t buy a customer for love or money. So he threw out the guy he had at the box office and hired a lady who had arthritis very bad. She could move her hands, but very slowly.
Somebody would come up to the box office to buy a ticket and it would take her maybe ten minutes to make change. The day he hired her he was in business. She took so long that she built a line. Every time three people tried to buy a ticket the line grew. Pretty soon they had lines all around the Winter Garden. People would see the lines and ask, ‘What show is going on here?’ It was fantastic, and then Walter Winchell wrote an item in his column to the effect that ‘They’re standing